


happily ever afters are hard to come by

by warsfeil



Category: Fruits Basket
Genre: F/M, Gen, Gender Issues, Male Pronouns for Ritsu, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27334105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warsfeil/pseuds/warsfeil
Summary: The stories go like this: once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess and a handsome prince. The princess was raised in a wonderful castle, until a villain attacks, for whatever reason. Then there is a curse, and the princess suffers, and the prince breaks the curse with the power of true love. With the curse broken, the prince and the princess are free, and they have a happily ever after ending with no strife or suffering.Reality isn’t that kind.
Relationships: Mitsuru/Sohma Ritsu
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	happily ever afters are hard to come by

The stories go like this: once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess and a handsome prince. The princess was raised in a wonderful castle, until a villain attacks, for whatever reason. Then there is a curse, and the princess suffers, and the prince breaks the curse with the power of true love. With the curse broken, the prince and the princess are free, and they have a happily ever after ending with no strife or suffering.

Reality isn’t that kind.

Perhaps, Ritsu thinks, his first mistake was thinking he could ever be something as important as the princess. He’s nowhere near beautiful enough for that, and he certainly isn’t the prince -- he’d fall off a horse before he could ride it into the sunset, and no one with any sense would allow him to go near an object as sharp as a sword.

He doesn’t know what his second mistake is, but he’s sure he’s made at least a dozen. Somewhere in there is definitely the current mistake, which has lead to him being at the main house, several carefully folded furisode in his arms. He’s kept them for too long, and he wants to get rid of them, now, to put them in a place where he can’t possibly fall back on them as a crutch. They’re expensive, of course, so he’ll give them back to the main house. It makes sense, he thinks.

Until he runs into Akito.

“I’m sorry!” Ritsu wails, immediately upon seeing her. “It was too forward of me to intrude without invitation or permission, I’ll go at once--”

Akito leans back. “I don’t,” Akito says, awkwardly, “care if you’re here or not.”

Ritsu trails off. It’s a far cry from the Akito of the past. He can count his interactions with Akito on one hand and still have fingers to spare; even at the banquets, she was an untouchable god, far more concerned with Yuki and Kureno and Shigure than someone as unimportant as Ritsu. But villains don’t die in the end, and Akito is still in front of him, with a carefully pressed dress and hair longer than Ritsu’s, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. 

“You don’t need permission from me,” Akito says, “anymore. Do whatever you want.” She looks away, folding her arms across her chest and focusing on a point in the wall. There’s nothing there; Ritsu follows her gaze for a moment before he snaps it back to Akito.

He shouldn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what to say. He never knows what to say.

“I was just,” Ritsu says, “returning these.” He shifts the furisode, the washi paper crinkling as he does so. Akito looks at them sidelong, and then frowns, and Ritsu feels his heart sink. “I’m sorry! It isn’t something I should bother someone as important as you with -- I know where the storage room is, I’ll go directly there and then leave and you won’t have to worry--”

“Why?” Akito asks.

Ritsu stops, the single word derailing his entire thought process before he can do anything else. “What?” Ritsu asks, before he can revise it into a more polite statement, before he can make sure that it’s the least offensive, least troublesome way to ask a question. He shouldn’t even be asking it. 

“Why are you returning them?” Akito asks. 

“They belong here,” Ritsu says. He feels uncomfortable under Akito’s gaze. It’s different now than it was before, and Ritsu doesn’t feel the same reverence he did, once, but Akito is still the head of the family. She’s still important -- much more so than someone like him. “I -- it was rude of me to use them for so long!”

“It’s fine,” Akito says, “if you want to keep them.” 

Ritsu stops mid-bow and raises his head. It means he meets Akito’s gaze again, and he doesn’t know what it is he sees there -- Akito is still frowning, her brows drawn together and her posture stiff and unyielding. 

“It only causes trouble,” Ritsu says, slowly, “if someone like me wears them.”

“Because you’re a boy?” Akito asks, sharply, and Ritsu flinches. 

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It must be terribly embarrassing to have to associate with someone like me -- to have someone like me in the family! I’m sorry that it’s taken so long for me to change!” Ritsu says.

Akito steps forward, and Ritsu stops breathing. He knows the kind of things she’s done before, and he doesn’t want to raise her ire, but all she does is grab the top furisode, let it unfurl in her arms until the washi paper slips away and she can hold it up. It’s one of Ritsu’s favorites, delicate pink and floral, and his stomach twists. He didn’t have to see them when they were wrapped, didn’t have to think about what he’s giving up. 

“It’s nice,” Akito says.

“It’s my favorite,” Ritsu says, too quickly, regretting the words instantly. “Ah -- but it would look better on someone like you!” Akito’s face twists, and Ritsu tries to revise it. “Or, or-- or anyone--”

“Didn’t it look fine,” Akito says, “on you?”

Ritsu stares at her, and Akito stares back, unwavering. She folds the fabric over her arm, and then places it back on the stack, washi paper still in a pile on the floor.

“I won’t take it back,” Akito says.

“I’m returning them!” Ritsu insists.

“I don’t want them,” Akito says. “I’m giving them to you.”

It’s rude to refuse a gift, but Ritsu knows the price of these. He also knows it’s nothing in the face of the Sohma fortunes, and he wavers. He clutches the stack to him, precariously; he doesn’t know how to say anything important, doesn’t know how to communicate a single thing that he wants to say. It’s always like this. He’s always like this. When it comes down to it, he’s just useless. 

“But I shouldn’t wear them,” Ritsu says, weakly. 

“Did someone say that?” Akito asks.

Ritsu pauses. No one has ever directly told him that he shouldn’t wear women’s clothing, which is fine -- it’s something he’s internalized, a decade plus of people saying that he’s weird or mistaking him for a woman or apologizing for his presence. 

“Why does it matter,” Akito says, “what you wear, if you feel comfortable in it?” 

She isn’t looking at him again, and so Ritsu looks at her, instead. Takes in the way she’s kept her bangs the same, even if her hair is pinned back at her neck, a few inches longer than it was. The dress that doesn’t emphasize her curves, just falls to her knees in a sheet of blue. The determined set to her posture that wasn’t there once: there’s no more lanquidity to her posture, only purpose, sharp and determined.

“I don’t want to keep causing problems for everyone,” Ritsu says. 

Akito looks at Ritsu for a long moment, and then sighs. 

“Do whatever you want,” she says, and she sounds so tired that Ritsu feels something like worry in his chest. “But don’t leave those here. They’re yours.” She waves a hand at the furisode, a vague gesture, and then starts to walk past Ritsu. She stops when they’re level with each other, tilts her head and surveys him in a way that she never has before. 

“I know it isn’t worth much, after all this time,” Akito says, softly, “but I never disliked that part of you.”

She’s gone before Ritsu can really process it, leaving him standing alone in the hallway of the main house with an arm full of kimono and more confusion than he knows what to do with. 

Ritsu thought that it would feel different. That something inside of him had been broken, and would be fixed, if only the curse was broken. It wasn’t. Then he’d thought it would be fixed if he cut his hair -- if he dressed like a boy -- if he pushed himself and pushed himself and pushed himself. But that only served to widen the cracks, to make it feel like he was breathing shards of glass everytime he inhaled. 

Ritsu takes the furisode home. He takes a long look in the mirror, at his short hair and his button-down shirt, at the silhouette that feels wrong in all the important ways and right in all the ways that mark him as a failure. He thinks of Akito, and he thinks of the concept of happiness, and he thinks of all the people he knows and the ways they’ve found themselves despite the world seeming to be against them. 

So, in the end, the story goes like this: there is no prince, and no princess, and the villain is just as much of a hero as anyone else is. There are only people, who hurt each other and heal each other for reasons more complicated than any fairy tale. There is a curse, and it’s broken, but Ritsu can’t say if it’s by anything as grandiose as true love or not. 

Ritsu doesn’t know what a happily ever after looks like, for him. He doesn’t know if this is a story that has that kind of thing. But he shows up at the restaurant to meet Mitchan, and she smiles, wide and relieved, and says: “That kimono looks so beautiful on you!” 

She takes his hand in hers, and he asks her about her work and she asks him about his parents, and Ritsu thinks there’s a place for someone like him in a world like this after all.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this instead of doing any of the fics i should be doing. you can find me on twitter @warsfeils, where i go into histrionics about fruits basket at regular intervals!


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